What’s the best strategy for making your organization more social?

Where do you start to transform your systems, so that you can transform your organization?

Many social media experts suggest that you work from the outside-in.

They encourage organizations to start with one function and one stakeholder group, and ‘get social’ by linking CRM (customer relationship management) systems to the organizational groups involved in customer support.

The smarter way to change is for the organization to get social from the inside-out.

Why? Because comprehensive change requires addressing the core of the organization itself.

The core of your organization’s digital systems is your organization’s intranet.

That’s why we should focus on intranets as we strive to make our organizations more social.

The Intranet as Your Organization’s Digital Core

As traditionally designed, intranets are a combination of portals and repositories, functioning in the background of your day to day activity. Your intranet is where all kinds of ‘managed content’ are located. It’s the place you go for reference materials, bulletins, request forms, employee directories and maybe a white label email system.

If your organization has an intranet you probably use it every day, several times a day, without paying much attention to it. Intranets are “stealth applications”, used regularly but pervasively in the background of your work.

If you work in a smaller organization, you might not have an official intranet. Instead you use an intranet proxy to access the resources of your organization. This proxy might be an external email system (like Outlook or Gmail), a file-sharing & collaboration system (like early Sharepoint) or your organization’s website.

A Common Center that Represents “The Organization”

Whether it’s a formal intranet or an intranet proxy, this place where you start your digital work day provides a common organization-focused center for all members. Thus, intranets should be the starting point for any system of organizational engagement.

Even more important, as the digital starting point of your work, the intranet actually represents your organization to you, and to every other member using it.

Intranets are the digital communications systems that cohere and construct organizations.

I know, intranets are old news. Many intranets are boring, underfunded, decoupled from business strategy, and lacking in tech-sex appeal.

Worse, we take intranets for granted, as the “always there”, “always on”, and nearly invisible.

But, because they are the shared backbone of your organization’s digital communication,

Intranets are the digital social scaffolding of the organization’s structure, processes and culture.

If you want to change your customer relationships and your brands to make them social, by all means start with boundary-crossing systems like CRM and work you way inside to support these changes.

But, if you want a more social organization, one that can support engagement among external and internal stakeholders, then you need to address the structure, processes and culture at your organization’s core.

Go social from the inside-out, and start by socializing your intranet.

See also: Social Intranet Design and Organizational Identity: Design for functionality and character

Images: Tiny Apple and Tiny Apple Core, on Flickr Some rights reserved by me and the sysop

“Social Business” is coming to your organization, whether you’re ready or not.

Social business tools, also known as enterprise social media or systems of engagement, are increasingly being advocated by vendors and consultants as tools that help any organization do its work better.

But, while the influx of social tools could really benefit your organization, the advice about how and why to use social tools could actually prevent your organization from using these tools to their full potential.

That’s because so much of what you’ll hear about why and how to incorporate social business tools into your organization, while well-intentioned, is fundamentally misguided.

7 Ways that Social Business Advice is Misguided

1. It’s Technology-driven

Misguided social business advice is driven by the availability of bright shiny new enterprise social media technology.

Wise social business advice is purpose-driven. It aims to tap into the pent-up desire of organizations, members, and stakeholders for deeper, richer and more authentic communication, communication that helps them achieve their collective purpose.

2. It’s Customer-centric

Misguided social business advice is driven by a focus on customers and customers’ needs. Employees and organizations either excluded, treated as afterthoughts, or seen as means to an end.

Wise social business advice is people-centric. It puts the organization and its members first, understanding that the organization and the people within it are the engines of authentic change and the source of true value.

3. It’s Reactionary

Misguided social business advice is reactionary. It takes the “Oh crap, here it comes, might as well figure out how to fit it in” approach.

Wise social business advice is visionary. It is energized by a vision of what the organization and its stakeholder system could be like, if authentic communication was fostered and supported.

4. It Extolls Efficiency

Misguided social business advice urges us to automate and digitize whatever we can that might make work more efficient.

It puts new digital architecture on top of old digital architecture. It tries to separate content from process, as though process were content-agnostic.

Wise social business advice has a generative orientation. It has a creative flavor.

Wise social business advice starts with the questions like: “What more can we contribute together, to each other?
What tools can we use to foster and support these contributions”?

Wise social media advice helps organizations flourish, by focusing on how to support the personal, interpersonal and collective systems that create value.

5. Adoption is driven by Vendors

Misguided social business advice is driven by vendors who want to sell more tools, more systems, more consulting, and more stuff. It preys on organizations’ fears that they must have the latest stuff in order to be competitive.

Wise social business advice takes the perspective of makers, right inside your organization. It begins by recognizing what we already have that’s working, what we already have that we value, what we already have that we can tweak. It helps us figure out what we really ‘need’ to support our collective purpose.

6. It’s Obsessed with Numbers

Misguided social business advice is obsessed with numbers. It is driven by the logic of ROI. It takes an investment-return, input-output approach to (over-)emphasize just a small part of what social media systems can do for us. Misguided social business advice tells us to count, to compete and to keep score.

Wise social business advice is driven by the logic of quality, by the search for real value. It invites us to make qualitative adjustments, to recognize the role of aesthetics, to appreciate emotion, to help experience working relationships as sources of delight, insight, joy, and fun.

Wise social business advice helps us use these tools to be more human, more “community“.

7. It’s All ‘Business’

Misguided social business advice intends to help you run a business, make stuff, deliver a service.

Wise social business advice intends to nurture and sustain a flourishing organizational eco-system. It seeks to to help you build capacity in your organization, your members, and your stakeholders individually and as a system.

Well-intentioned and Misguided

There are many folks with great enthusiasm about social tools and great intentions about helping organizations.  Lots of their advice is useful, but very little of it is comprehensive, truly visionary, or deeply inspiring. It’s too much about ‘business as usual’. It’s not enough about ‘organizations as they could be’.

It’s not wise to focus on Social Business. Instead, focus on Social Organizations to really make a difference.

Misguided social business advice has got a lot of things bass-ackward. It treats the organization as a fresh site for selling new technologies, and organizational change strategies only matter because they’ll help us implement technology more efficiently.

Wise social business advice, in contrast, understands that social technology, systems, and tools matter only because they have the potential for enabling our collective purpose.

I’ve been composing a list of sources for wise social media advice, so if you have any links, blogs, or tweeters to recommend, please let me know. I’ll post the list in a few weeks.

See also:

Systems of Engagement: Technology for Social Organizations
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Social Organizations and IT Leadership: Resources

Note: The posts hyperlinked above are absolutely not intended as examples of misguided advice. They’re there for context, definitions, further ideas for you, etc.

Images: Graffiti showing frown on…from Horia Varlan
rhythm and blues from iboy_daniel
blue green glass abstract from Brent 2.0

Why do we really need to log in to websites we use all the time?

Why do those logins really matter, to us personally?

Logins matter for three reasons– two that are predictable, and one that’s rather surprising.

1. Website logins improve the targeting of the site itself, in ways that benefit the organization.

Logins allow sites and the businesses/groups behind them to track who’s there and why, making it possible for them to focus content, personalize offers, offer visit-specific support, solicit feedback, invite you return, close sales, and more.

2. Website logins improve the targeting of the site in ways that have have some secondary benefit to us as customers.

I get some convenience, additional security, increased functionality, and more, that might be valuable to me in my relationship to that particular website.

But in the end, is there anything about a login that really benefits us, as people?

Well, yes, actually.

Website logins help to create the feeling that we belong.

That we matter. That we’ve made it past the rope. That we are somehow special.

Isn’t that weird?

When we login to websites, we get the experience of knocking on the door, being recognized, and having the door opened so that we can enter.

Of course, to trigger a feeling of recognition and welcome, the login must be well-designed.

There is nothing more frustrating, or easier for creating resentment, than the unkind routines some websites put you through when you forget or (gasp) mistype your password.

(I find this particularly annoying, since I am a handicapped typist and struggle even with typing my own name accurately. That’s why I love the funny note on one of my iPhone apps that blames the tiny smartphone keys if a password is incorrect.)

Because the login is such a simple step, and the responses so routinized, it’s also quite easy to design the experience to be warm and welcoming. Thus, it’s quite easy to garner some subtle but positive vibes for your site- and for your organization.

Why think about website logins and sense of membership?

What made me think about the psychology of logins was not only Chris Tuttle’s post about Nonprofit Engagement: Why Website Logins Matter, but also my recent road trip up i-95.

There’s one state where the EZPass lanes are marked “Members Only”. This always makes me laugh (really, who thinks of herself as a ‘member’ of EZPass?). Also, though, I recognize that this makes me, an EZPass ‘member’ feel special.

Go figure.

The outcomes may be subtle, and the dynamics may seem silly at the surface, but remember–

It’s the little, micro-interactions–  like the website login — that can make the first positive emotional impression on your visitors.

Make us feel welcomed.

Make us feel special.

Treat us as members.

It’s super subtle psychology you can use to your advantage and to the advantage of the mutual project that we engage in on your site, together.

Use Extreme Leverage 2.0 to Change The Social World
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Image: Toll Booth by JacobEnos Some rights reserved

It’s easy to see how Employer Branding is useful to HR departments and potential job applicants.

Employer Branding, the practice of marketing images of your organization as a desirable place to work towards potential job applicants, is a sensible strategy for attracting the right people onto your bus (-iness).

Employer Branding works to draw to an organization the kind of people the organization wants to hire, by making the organization look like it has specific, compelling, desirable characteristics.

Promoting an idealized or crystallized view of “what it’s like to work here”, organizations and their HR departments hope to increase applicants, reduce recruiting inefficiencies, improve yield, and keep employees longer, all because these new employees experience improved person-organization /employee-employer fit.

Sounds good for HR, sounds good for potential employees.

And, although it is designed to attract future employees, Employee Branding also has a few benefits for current employees.

3 Ways Employer Branding Can Benefit Current Employees

l. The Employer Brand may bring new insight to key managers.

An Employer Branding campaign requires someone in the organization to spend time thinking about “what it’s like to work here” from the employees’ point of view.

Taking the employees’ perspective (however briefly and instrumentally) may give managers and HR departments new insights about the everyday experiences of organization members. These new insights might inspire managers to systematize, reinforce or change the environment at work to make the environment more attractive.

2. The Employer Brand may trigger sense-making and action by current employees.

The messages of an Employee Branding campaign are seen not only by outside, potential employees but also by inside, current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can create an opportunity for people in the organization to talk with each other about what their organization is like as an employer. Conversations about the Employer Brand might address questions like ” Is this what its like to work here?” and “How can we work together to make this environment more like that idealized picture?”

An uptick in awareness, the invitation to consider the Employer Brand, and the opportunity to talk about it together might lead employees to reinforce and/or improve the organizational environment themselves.

3. The Employer Brand can improve the contributions of new employees to the experience of current employees.

The Employer Brand can help draw the ‘right kind’ of coworkers into the organization, reinforcing the desirable elements of the work environment and helping to fulfill the promise of ‘the brand’ for current and new employees alike.

Of course, the Employer Brand can only have these positive effects if it is somewhat true and reasonably credible. An Employer Brand made up of unreal claims, however desirable these claims may be, would only create disappointment and resentment among current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can help a current employee these three ways, as long as the current employee has a good personal fit with the desired, projected Employer Brand.

Bonus Benefit if you don’t fit

And for the employee who doesn’t fit the work context of this projected Employer Brand?

There’s still a positive influence. The Employer Branding campaign may help that current employee realize that this organization really *isn’t* a good fit, and inspire the employee to look for a different employer, an organization that has a better fit with his or her own values and needs.

See also:

Images:
GoodFitting When Fastened, and CloseUp Some rights reserved by Lee Turner on Flickr

Traditionally, extreme leverage is something organizations worked hard to avoid.   Now, in the social media landscape,  ”Extreme Leverage 2.0″ is something that evey organization should embrace.

Why? Because Extreme Leverage 2.0 allows a few people, in relatively small businesses, to change the world for their stakeholders.

Understanding Extreme Leverage 2.0

In the world of corporate finance, extreme leverage often hampers your organization’s effectiveness. You’re up to your ears in debt, having borrowed to your limit, and organizational life is pressured and often miserable. It’s win or lose for you. To make matters worse,  your debt/equity ratio scares the crap out of anyone who might be interested in working with you.

In the 2.0 world, Extreme Leverage is completely different.

With Extreme leverage 2.0, your organization has the ability to influence the experience of hundreds, even millions of stakeholders, even when your organization is small enough that you might all fit in one conference room. The combination of your user/employee ratio and your effort/influence ratio give you tremendous reach and tremendous opportunity to shape people’s social behavior. Together, these two components of Extreme Leverage 2.0 make it possible for a few people, in relatively small companies, to change the world.

User/Employee Ratio

I first thought of the idea of Extreme Leverage 2.0 when I saw this post about internet companies with few employees but millions of users. I was struck by ratio of users (or stakeholders) to employees (or members) at these very well-known and influential social media companies. (Thanks to Royal Pingdom for the numbers.) For example,

Take Mozilla: 400 million downloads / 250 employees
Or Twitter: 175 million users / 300 employees
Or Tumbler: 12 million users / 18 employees

It’s mind-boggling when you think about the ratio between the number of people who use the organization’s product to the number of people who make the product being ‘a million to one’, or ‘two million to one’. In each of these organizations, one person’s contribution to the product can structure the experience of an astronomical number of users.

Effort/Influence Ratio

The effort/influence ratio is the relationship between the amount of effort an employee or member has to put into a decision and the amount of social change that this decision might produce. In companies with Extreme Leverage 2.0, decisions that members make about very basic features of their product have broad and even deep ramifications for the experiences of their huge number of users. The effort/influence ratio is a specific case of the “butterfly effect”, where a small difference in an intitial condition ends up producing big changes in a system.

What’s distinctive about Extreme Leverage 2.0 is that the effort/influence ratio is appreciated and used as a way to deliberately create a shift in users’ relationships with each other, with the organization, with society, or with their selves, that liberates them.

The 2.0 -ness of Extreme Leverage

I’m calling this kind of leverage “2.0″ because this leverage is easily available to any organization that uses social media inside and/or across their organization’s boundaries. Certainly, the mechanics and economics of building social media platforms & tools make this industry extremely leveraged by design — it only takes so many people to build and run a platform, and once built, it doesn’t take a huge influx of new employees to scale up to large numbers of users.

Still, organizations in other industries can also take advantage of extreme leverage 2.0, when they choose their social media tools and strategies. As I’ve written before, the ways that  interactions are scripted into the software itself can shape the relationships between the organization and the stakeholder. (For example, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a well-extablished approach to build-in social change through software design, that takes advantage of extreme leverage 2.0.)

The 2.0 -ness of this social change influence goes beyond using social media tools to organize and lead people to social change action. It goes beyond using processes and software born from an ethically-motivated, gift-culture oriented ethos, as with Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Instead, the social change influence comes from building social changes into the product itself.

Examples of Extreme Leverage 2.0

Let me give you two specific examples of subtle social change that takes advantage of Extreme Leverage 2.0.

Hashable

Hashable, a networking app that helps users introduce people to each other, has about 14 employees and over 10,000+ users (as of Jan. ’11).

Recently, Hashable made a subtle and significant change to the wording of the automatic message that’s part of a Hashable introduction.

As SXSW Hashable Evangelist Natalia Oberti Noguera explains:

Hashable has made me feel that they genuinely care about my feedback, even integrating a #languagematters suggestion I made regarding their automated copy. Emily (Hickey) et al changed the standard language in an email intro via their website from “Hi Guys” to “Hi there.” A small change with a big impact.

Now, with every single introduction made through Hashable, users receive a gender-neutral welcome. That gender-neutral welcome recognizes us all equally.

Diaspora

The second example comes from Diaspora, the open source alternative to facebook. Diaspora has 107 contributors, and thousands of beta users.

One Diaspora contributor, Sarah Mei (a Ruby on Rails software developer), decided to structure the “gender” field of the individual’s profile in a way that was, intentionally, liberatory.

As Sarah Mei describes in her Nov 2011 post, Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora”

The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female.

My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.

One person’s thoughtful consideration of a foundational element of a social network, and her subsequent contribution to software & product design, has now made it possible for millions of future users to describe their gender any way they choose. Take that, binary thinking!

And, of course, there is the change that Facebook made back in February, now allowing people to indicate their relationship status as “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.” Facebook seems like a huge company, but with 400 million users and only 1,200 employees, Facebook certainly has Extreme Leverage 2.0.

Each of these changes is very small, in terms of the work was actually required to change the product. But these changes, to the user, are anything but small. From gender neutral language, to self-description, to relationship recognition, these changes all make it possible for users to present ourselves as we see ourselves, and for users to be in charge of our own identity. They give authority for self-definition to us. It may seem almost negligible, but these changes are powerful.

By creating freedom in the very way we present ourselves, these changes create a foundation for authentic personal meaning, and for authentic interaction.

The Challenge and Opportunity of Extreme Leverage 2.0

What’s neat about this whole idea of extreme leverage is the way that it can be used by inspired, visionary, progressive and persuasive employees, organization members, or stakeholders to make a difference in our social world. Each one of the changes, above, required just one or a small number of organization members to identify and understand that a particular design choice could have an important social impact, and to consider what they wanted that impact to be. These changes just required a few lines of code to create. There’s the opportunity of Extreme Leverage 2.0.

And the challenge? The challenge is for organizations and members to decide to be deliberate and thoughtful about the larger social impact of their product design decisions.

Social media platforms and the code that supports them reflect the political & social values of the developers, the product managers, the entrepreneurs, and even the investors involved in the product.  Often these choices are treated as though they are only about ‘what the product does’ or ‘what’s most efficient’. Basic decisions just replicate taken-for-granted assumptions about how things already are. But, stepping back to consider the larger ramifications of product choices invites these same developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and investors to be conscious of what else their product could do.

Why should you care about Extreme Leverage 2.0:

Let me borrow Sarah Mei’s explanation to suggest why Extreme Leverage 2.0 matters. She writes:

I made this change to Diaspora so that I won’t alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up.

I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can’t be contained by a list.

I know a lot of people aren’t there with me yet. So I also made this change to give them one momentary chance to consider other possibilities.

Extreme Leverage 2.0 challenges us and offers us the opportunity, as organizations and as individual workers, to use our extreme influence to do good.

Let’s use the idea of Extreme Leverage 2.0 to remind us that as we create products, we should give ourselves the chance to consider other possibilities. Then, we should build these possibilities into our products, and change the social world.

See also:
“Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context) by Sarah Dopp
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
How Social Media Creates Organizational Meaning
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?

Thanks to Jon Pincus (@jdp23) for introducing me to Diaspora, and for sustaining the conversation about software design and social change.

Social Media helps us get work done. And, Social Media has a unique ability to show us something about how we get work done that we often overlook. It allows us to see both conventional work and “invisible work”.

What is invisible work?

Invisible work includes all kinds of energy and tasks that contribute to achieving organizational goals but that happen offstage, are done by people who we don’t pay attention to, or aren’t recognized as ‘work’.

When work is invisible, we don’t see how it contributes to results, how much effort it takes to perform, or how much skill it takes to do this invisible work well. We fail to appreciate what this invisible work contributes, and we fail to value it. And yet, without this invisible work, the effort behind it, and the people who perform it, we’d be hard-pressed to achieve much at all.

Social Media Reveals Relational Work

One of the most common forms of invisible work is ‘relational work‘ — all that effort we put into creating, sustaining and transforming relationships. This social, psychological, interpersonal, and emotional work is critical to our ability to contribute to the bottom line in an organization.

[Consider how, when it comes to performance reviews, we're rarely able to provide examples of this kind of work. We have examples of “concrete” task-y work that we've got done–wire frames, spreadsheets, sales calls–but we are less able to show a track record of the invisible work that made this other work possible.]

Now that social media — tools like Twitter, Yammer, SocialCast, Hashable– lets us see and track interactions between people, we can also see what’s going on in these relationships. These tools show us when a person is reaching out to someone, making introductions, recognizing others, affirming them, and more.

Social Media shows us not only who is connecting with whom, but also what they’re sending across that connection. We can see if people are sharing links, offering suggestions, making introductions, or offering positive words.

Beyond basic relationship-building actions, we can see people engaging in the absolute best and most difficult kinds of relational work. We can see them creating work relationships that foster the growth of the individuals in the relationship, the growth of the relational network, and the flourishing of the organization itself.

Relational Work Takes Effort and Skill

Growth-oriented relationships require real skill to build and to maintain. With social media, we can watch as people demonstrate skills like listening closely, acknowledging vulnerability, experiencing and expressing emotion, participating in the development of another, and managing mutual expectations.

Social Media brings into the light the invisible work that goes into nurturing, supporting, encouraging and facilitating the behavior of others.

Once we see this relational work, we can begin

• To see the value of this work,
• To see those who do so this work, and
• To value those who do this work.

Even better, we can learn from the people who contribute relational work to make our own work relationships stronger, more productive and more generative.

Social media itself doesn’t build relationships; we do. However, social media builds our ability to appreciate relationships and the skill the require.

Social Media helps us see the amount, the qualities, and the source of strong relationships, helping us value the work and the people who do it.

See also:

• Be Your Own Hashtag
• How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
• Is your organization flourishing or withering?

Images: Invisible from Daniel*1977, Je suis toujours invisible from Perfesser

References:
Daniels, A. K. (1987) Invisible Work, Social Problems, 34 (5).
Fletcher, J. (1999) Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. The MIT Press.

Social media tools can transform an organization.

One of the things I enjoy so much about social media is the chance to be (more often) the person I am, with my specific sets of talents, interests, and goals. Every time I extend myself out on social media, I get to choose what I’ll say, how I’ll represent an idea, and how I’ll demonstrate what that idea means to me.

The same is true for organizations. Each time an organization reaches out to share a message, it is aiming to create an impression on its audience(s) that conveys a sense of who that organization is and what it cares about. Each message creates meaning.

Historically, this reaching out, this extension of the organizational ‘self by creating meaning,’ happened in one of three ways:

1. formal corporate communication,
2. advertising (either for products or for corporate), and
3. CEO presentations (e.g., interviews, speeches).

All of these efforts involve managing the corporate, collective self into a single, intentional voice– keeping the meaning as tight and limited as possible. The message was (and is still) almost always massaged, shaped, intentional, deliberate, goal-oriented.

What makes social media so interesting as a tool for creating meaning about an organization and within an organization is that:

1.) Social Media messages often bypasses the ‘professional massage’ step, and
2.) Social Media messages come from many places, many individual and many interactions instead of one central source.

When communication bypasses the sausage machine, it can create meaning that evades centralized, controlled boundaries. It can be ‘off message’ and offer a very different meaning, it can be ‘on message’ and be more complex than the typical extruded meaning, and it can be somewhere in between, fleshing out and filling in our understanding of what that organization is all about.

Because social media communications come not only from ‘corporate’ or ‘marcomms’ efforts but also from online representatives, brandividuals, and a motley assortment of folks connected to the organization, all these additional, little bits of communication offer an alternative form of data for understanding the organization.

Instead of a massaged, managed, deliberate stream, social media give us many local, specific, situational, personalized messages about the organization.

While it’s true that sometimes the meaning conveyed in these messages just reinforces the centrally-managed meaning, a lot of these messages create new meaning.

New meaning gets created when individuals speak about something specific, on behalf of the organization.

When individuals are speaking on behalf of their organization to some interested person, that individual faces a unique challenge. S/he has to take the general, global, abstract, big picture message of the organization and translate it into the specific context. S/he has to understand the organization and s/he has to put that understanding into her or his own words. Her own words convey new meaning.

The organization member her or himself has to craft specific meaning out of a general understanding. In that moment of crafting, at that point of articulating, the individual has to put new words together in new ways to represent the organization’s point of view.

At that moment, in this unique communication, the individual creates new meaning about and for the organization.

One source of new meaning is how the individual translates an abstract organizational position into a specific statement. Another critical source of new meaning is that the individual contributes her or his own knowledge — local knowledge, from her or his direct engagement in the organization — into that message. That local, personal knowledge is almost always new information, and in this way the real experience of that individual member creates new meaning for the organization.

In the process of creating new meaning, the new meaning also accrues some additional heft. Not only does the new meaning get created, but also it gets ‘owned’. The person who said it owns it, and now has to stand behind it. S/he may called upon to repeat this message, to elaborate on its meaning or even to demonstrate it in her next interaction with that audience. Thus, the new meaning has legitimacy, some authority, and more than a little bit of authenticity.

Here on this blog, writing about the dynamics of social media, new meaning creation, and how it engages organizational identity and reputation challenges me the same way that writing ‘about’ Zappos culture on Twitter challenges the average Zappos employee.

We both have to take a big picture message, and convey a big picture intent, in specific communication acts. We have to understand, translate, embellish, exemplify, recreate, rewrite, from general to specific. We have to create new meaning each time, in each blog post and each tweet.

And so it is with each of us who, through social media, puts into words and into interactions the values, the attributes, the goals, the meaning of what we are part of, who we are speaking for, and what we are speaking about.

We’re not just making it up as we go along; we’re making new meaning as we talk together.

See also:

Be Your Own Hashtag
Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be
The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos
Why We Want Brandividuals on Social Media

Image: Solidarity….. misconceptions by Super is Sunny

[One of the special joys of blogging and tweeting about progressive movements in organizations and leadership is the relationships we make as we find kindred souls. These kindred souls are often tucked into niches other than our own, but because their approaches share the our fundamental values and because they are working with a shared purpose, we discover them as allies and friends.

Fran Melmed, who writes the blog free-range [communication], is one of those kindred souls. In one of our econversations about work+life+meaning, striving to be authentic to our full selves, and making a difference in the world, Fran offered to put pen to paper to try and capture that acute set of contradictions. I’m delighted to share it with you all as a guest post from Fran.]

The Stress of Not Having It All

Welcome to my confessional: I’m feeling the stress of not having it all.

What should be amusing about this is that I don’t even believe in the notion of having it all. But let me tell you, I’m not amused. I know that I don’t have it. And I want it.

A little background

About two years ago, my kids hit their tweens and were no longer the suction cups they once were. At the same time, I began hitting my stride in my chosen line of work: helping companies better engage their employees and their families in healthier living. Should be cause for celebration, right? Wahoo! My kids are growing up; they don’t need me. Away I go, soaring ever higher into the never-never land of wondrous, satisfying work.

Not so fast. Many moons ago, I made the personal decision to contain my career while I had kids in the house. (It’s based on my emotional baggage, to be sure, so don’t take this as my way of saying my choice is the choice.) When I became a mother while working at Hewitt, I worked part-time and then full-time, but flextime. When I left Hewitt, I started my own company to maintain, if not expand, the work-life balance Hewitt so generously supported.

I’m ready. Depression.*

And it’s wonderful. I have all that I want…except. Except for the ambitious, competitive and adventurous career side of me that aspires to growing my independent consulting firm tenfold. To implanting myself on the speaker circuit. Or taking that tantalizing mega-job at a start-up that’s nailing health engagement. Of my own choosing, these exciting paths beckon but are barred. I can’t have it all.

And so I feel like a part of me is untended and underdeveloped. I feel torn and stressed. And sometimes angry. After speaking with several friends, I realized I’m not alone. Our backgrounds and our choices may differ, as does what we’re missing or pining for. But to a person, we all felt the frustration of not having it all.

A false choice

Generally speaking, the notion of having it all is something women have embraced because for too long we couldn’t even have what we wanted, let alone it all. Perhaps, initially, having it all meant having the right to choose, as would have benefited my mother, who was told by her father that he’d financially support only nursing or education studies—studies suitable for a woman destined for marriage. With time, having it all became the Holy Grail, and just as elusive and mystical.

I think it’s time women recognize that we’re never going to have it all. We’re not going to have it all if we do fewer dishes. We’re not going to have it all when men wipe more babies’ bottoms than we do. And we’re not going to have it all when we storm the C-suite, like they stormed the Bastille, and rout the place.

I think it’s time men recognize that they, too, are never going to have it all. Not when a man pushing a baby in a swing at the neighborhood playground gathers no accolades. Not when more companies “man up” and supply paternity leave, either.

None of us—men or women—are going to have it all. Because we can’t. The entire concept is a farce—a snow job.

Is it the terminology or the elusiveness?

Every one of us has to make decisions that deny us elsewhere. Sometimes we’re forced to. Sometimes we choose to. Every one of us longs to have it all. Most of us know that it’s an impossibility. So, why does having it all have such a stranglehold on our consciousness?

Since communication is what I do, I can’t help but examine whether it’s the terminology. Are we stressed by the choice of words: “have it all”? Does our continued use of the phrase lead us to believe it is, in fact, possible and we’re the only ones who haven’t cracked the code? Or is the allure of having it all so strong that it blinds our reasoning?

And because employee health is what I encourage, I have to ask how not having it all plays into our work performance, our feelings of engagement and our health?

I’m left with more questions than answers.

Notes:
* If you saw The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, this phrase needs no explanation. If not, watch this.
You might also enjoy this post by Fran: no predictions, no resolutions. only courage.
See also: Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

Images: Blue + green from dichohecho , photo11_7A – Green + Blue from dichohecho, Green and blue from Raoul Pop

Isn’t Corporate Work-Life policy great? Here we have a progressive set of programs and strategies that:

• Acknowledge that every employee is more than a worker,
• Recognize that she or he is also a ‘whole person’ with a life that extends outside the workplace, and
• Demonstrate that employees’ full lives should be respected and maybe even facilitated by the organization.

Organizations that promote work-life policies get lots of reputational good will. For potential employees, work-life policies make some organizations ‘better places to work”. Organizations find work-life policies and programs are often correlated with higher employee performance, higher voluntary effort, and stronger financial returns.

Organizational work-life policies seem like a win-win. Organizations demonstrate respect for their employees’ full lives, and employees in turn respond positively towards the organization that is allowing them to manage the full breadth of their life’s activities.

But what if this view of Work-Life policy is more spin than reality? What if corporate work-life policies also work against employees and against employees’ best interests?

Organizations and employees/members are not equal partners in the work-life conversation.

In reality, organizations wield virtually all the power in the relationship. Organizations set the priorities and parameters that control work-life policy. Organizations offer (and take away) programs that are designed more to benefit the organization than to benefit any individual.

Even the way that we talk about work-life policies and initiatives is controlled by work organizations. Work-Life advocates appeal to corporate leaders’ and their profit motives to sell corporations on the idea of work-life policies. Seldom do corporations seek out leaders who are advocating for the importance of whole and meaningful lives, of which work is only a part.

In the conversation about Work-Life, there are three unchallenged assumptions:

1. “Work” always comes first.

Think it’s a coincidence that the phrase is Work-Life? That “work” is something separate from “life”, and that “Life” comes as the afterthought and not the focus?

With corporate work-life policies, the priority is always making sure that work happens.

Here’s a case in point: The recent article on HBR’s blog: Why Companies Should Insist Employees Take Naps.

If encouraging employees to take a half hour nap means they can be two or three times as productive over the subsequent three hours late in the day — and far more emotionally resilient — the value is crystal clear. It’s a win-win and a great investment.

Why are employees so tired that they need naps? What happens with the extra energy recovered by a nap? Better work. At work. For the business. And the health, sanity and life balance of the employee who napped? A nice afterthought.

2. Work-Life problems are the employees’ fault, and it’s the employees’ responsibility to fix them.

When an employee needs a day off to attend to a sick child, or can’t make a last minute weekend work session because she’s signed up for a triathlon, whose fault is it that these ‘life’ issues conflict with work demands?

Not only are these conflicts the individual’s fault, but they are also the individual’s problem to deal with. The individual (not the organization) has to find a way to “manage” these competing demands.

But if you think about it, it’s the organizations that created these issues in the first place. It’s organizations that design their work systems, workplaces, and work expectations that make it next-to-impossible for most new mothers to breast-feed their infants. It’s organizations that set their demands so high that people work 12 hour days without time for some physical exercise.

3. Work-life programs are controlled by the organization.

When it comes to managing the relationship between the demands of the organization and the demands of engaged full human lives, the organization holds all the power. Sure, you can ask for a reduced schedule while your partner goes through chemo, or to schedule your dinner break immediately after sundown during Ramadan, but if you lose you managers good opinion of your job commitment as a result, tough. And, if you lose your job over it, too bad.

Even the most forward thinking companies, work-life pioneers like SAS, can be fairly described as designing work-life policies with the ultimate goal of making work, and not “life” easier.

Let’s Take Charge of the Work-Life Policy Conversation

Once we recognize these three dangerous assumptions built into work-life policy, how can we change the conversation?

Work-Life advocates inside corporations, in academia, and in consulting, need to recognize these three assumptions and resist letting them influence the conversation.

Obviously, I’m not going to recommend that we do away with work-life policy. We need to continue to pressure and persuade organizations to expand their work-life policies and build-in more work-life flexibility. We also want to continue to press for the understanding that work-life flexibility approaches are part of an organization’s overall competitive strategy.

Let’s make sure we don’t fall over backwards thanking organizations for fixing problems that they actually caused. Let’s not be overly grateful when they take small steps forward. Let’s not thank them for being altruistic when so many organizations are really just being instrumental. If their goal really is to make sure that more and better work gets done, fine. Let’s just be clear about that.

And, let’s not treat corporations that introduce work-life policy as though they are ‘the good guys’ for being socially progressive, when they are also the bad guys who have really just begun making appropriate amends.

We need to keep corporate work-life initiatives in perspective– too many are intended and executed to make things “better” and not to make the relationship between employees and organizations profoundly different.

Organizations may control work-life programs & policies, but we all should take charge of the work life/life work conversation.

Our goal should not be to “alleviate” work-life conflict for employees and members so that “everybody can be more productive”. Our goals should go beyond creating the flexibility that allows an employee to take time out to pray or to attend a child’s school play. Our goal should be to redesign organizations that respect and accommodate employees full loves. Only when employees can flourish both inside and outside of work can organizations finally flourish.

Image:
The Humans Must Be Controlled, Some rights reserved by jarl Lyng on Flicr

See Also:
Tyson Foods lacks faith in its own identity.
Work-Life Fit is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

Working The Good Life: SAS Provides Employees With Generous Work Incentives: CBSnews

Some people actually believe(d) that BP was making an authentic effort to move “Beyond Petroleum”.

I was quite surprised to discover this early in June, in conversation with an organizational change consultant who specializes is sustainability change.

This consultant explained that, in contrast to other energy companies that he had worked with, BP was making progress towards becoming more sustainable in its day to day processes. He also believed that BP was making a significant (enough) financial investment in developing alternative energy sources. He’d actually seen changes in BP’s procedures, and mentioned a few actions that BP had taken over the past 5 years or so that demonstrated to him that their commitment to alternative energy was authentic.

Really?

Even before the current Oil Spill confirmed people’s worst fears about the company’s lack of commitment to sustainability, worker safety and environmental safeguards, BP was a poster child for the concept of greenwashing. Everything from the language in their advertisements to the imagery of their revised logo, put a waxy organic gloss over the corporation’s activities. Some people actually believed the hype.

But they didn’t believe the hype because they were fools, or because BP was inordinately clever with its PR. They believed the hype because they saw actions that, to them, seemed to demonstrate that changes were underway.

The Ambiguities of Change

Many of us have found ourselves mired in similar ambiguity during organizational change processes. We hear the organization’s leaders claiming that ‘change is important’. We see the organization’s leaders putting the change issue on the agenda, budgeting money for it, and sending employees to workshops. We hear individual managers (sometimes our own managers, and sometimes even ourselves) talking up the changes ahead, reiterating that the organization is committed. And, we see others and ourselves taking some basic steps towards the new direction.

We also see managers contradicting themselves. We watch leaders continue ‘business as usual’. We even see demonstration projects go underfunded and under-supported, because other goals get in the way. So at the same time that we see evidence of change, we also see evidence of no change.

It’s enough make you feel betrayed, or simply foolish.

The Gap between Claims and Actions

Often, the biggest indicator of hypocrisy in the organization is the gap between the organization’s claims about who it wants to be, and its actions in the here and now. When the organization does not do what it says it’s going to do, or does not demonstrate what it claims is important, we know that their commitment to change is inauthentic.

Or is it?

The gap between what we say and what we do can demonstrate something other than hypocrisy. The gap can demonstrate learning.

BP: Caught in the act of learning?

In order to change, organizations have to act their way into new identities. We don’t get to show a little corporate advertising and then claim that -poof- the change has occurred. As we’re getting there, we’re taking new actions and also some old actions, demonstrating new ways of thinking while continuing to rely on old ways of thinking. We’re learning how to be the ‘new’ us.

Sometimes organizations don’t get far enough into the new kinds of actions before someone, or some situation, calls into question whether or not their intentions to change are real. If the organization’s intentions were real, wouldn’t the organization have more to show to support these claims?, we ask.

But if the change effort is relatively new, and/or relatively comprehensive, there may not be be enough action to legitimate these claims to change.

Moreover, it’s not that easy to become something new… not only do we have to change by moving away from old systems, behaviors, norms, etc. but also we have to create new ones. We don’t always know the best new systems or how to make them work, and so we have to experiment. We have to learn how to become the organizations that we want to become. And learning takes time.

We want to believe.

Organizational change efforts often ask us to contort our own sense making. We have to believe that these changes matter and that they can come true, in order to act effectively to bring these changes about. And, we have to do this when evidence all around us supports the alternative, that no change at all is changing.

At BP, somebody had to believe that BP could indeed move “Beyond Petroleum”. For any movement towards sustainability to occur, somebody– actually, several somebodies — at BP had to take some action(s) in spite of evidence all around them that BP would continue to extract instead of replenish.

I bet there are employees of BP who honestly believed that BP was changing. Not only the employees in the Alternative Energy Division, or the HR department, or the MarComms area, but regular rank and file employees. Across the 96,000 of them, some portion of them had to have believed.

Now, you’ve got to wonder how these employees feel. Gullible? Maybe. Ashamed? Possibly. Betrayed? You’d think so.

With BP, there is a chance that all of their talk about alternative energy and sustainability is just talk. There’s also the chance that, in some parts of the organization and among some employees, behavior was changing, new systems were being created, and new norms were being established, that would demonstrate real change towards sustainability and ‘beyond petroleum’.

You may say that it’s silly to ask whether whether “Beyond Petroleum” was pure hypocrisy or rather an effort to change that hadn’t gotten very far. What we can say is that BP’s actions over the last 9 weeks have pretty well demonstrated that the organization hasn’t learned much of anything at all about being more sustainable. Even as BP has moved to respond to the Oil Spill, its actions have compounded the harm to the environment.

But I don’t think that this is an either / or situation. BP may have been hypocritical and BP may have been learning how to be more sustainable.

That both/ and conclusion may reflect the reality of organizational change, but it doesn’t clean up the Gulf, restore the wetland habitats, or move us to renewable energy sources.

And, it doesn’t let BP as a corporation off the hook.

What it may do, however, is soften the sense of betrayal and gullibility that many BP employees rightly feel.

Some BP employees wanted to believe, they wanted to make a difference, they weren’t being hypocritical. They just hadn’t learned enough or changed things enough to make BP better.

See Also:

• Chris MacDonald, on The Business Ethics Blog: BP: Not Really “Beyond Petroleum,” Just Greenwash After All
• Rebecca Lefton, on ThinkProgress: BP’s Greenwashing Masked Dangerous ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Reality
• Mockulation ®: Regulating Wall Street Using the Psychology of Public Mockery
• Faking an Identity: How Inauthentic Organizations Dress Up

Images: Quartet of BP Sheilds from Worlds’BestLogos
1922 BP advert, Image by DominusVobiscum on Flickr
Oliver_p10′s entry at LogoMyWay